


The Warehouse

by pulpriter



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-10
Updated: 2015-05-10
Packaged: 2018-03-29 20:22:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3909382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pulpriter/pseuds/pulpriter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack and Phryne find themselves completely in the dark</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Warehouse

**Author's Note:**

> This is nothing but the worst contrived fluff. If I were in Australia and could watch Season 3, maybe I wouldn't write such nonsense.  
> I do not own any of these characters, I just love them.

Jack and Phryne were at wits’ end. All week they had been working on a case that seemed to combine smuggling with murder. Every lead took them nowhere; they were stymied. Finally, they got a tip that the evidence they needed was in an old warehouse not far from the docks. They made plans to meet at the warehouse at 11:00, to ensure that they would be able to investigate under cover of darkness. To avoid discovery, they brought only one torch, even though that would make it more difficult to search.  
They entered the cavernous building. They looked in one section after another, silently, signaling to each other with hand motions. They pried open one carton, found nothing suspicious, and moved on to the next. After they turned up nothing in the sixth carton, Jack was ready to suggest they give up for the evening. It was getting very cold in the warehouse, and they didn’t seem to be accomplishing anything. He began to suspect that they had purposely been sent on a wild-goose chase.  
Both of them went still when they heard a noise nearby. Phryne quickly switched off the torch and set it down. Each of them took out their guns.  
Phryne grabbed Jack’s arm and pointed to a walled-off section that seemed to hold the source of the sound. The walls appeared to be recently constructed, and there was a solid-looking door as well. That seemed suspicious, when the rest of the warehouse was hardly even secured. Because the room was clearly built to hide something, the walls were tightly sealed, making this room even darker inside than the rest of the warehouse.  
They carefully made their way into the room. Suddenly, behind them, the door slammed shut, leaving them in near-total darkness. They heard footsteps running away.  
“Damn it!” Jack growled. “Oldest trick in the book!”  
“It’s so dark!” Phryne caught her heel in a groove in the floor, stumbled, and fell against Jack. He helped her regain her balance.  
“Here, take my hand. Let’s move back toward the door.”  
“Jack, we’re sitting ducks,” Phryne worried. “Do you think—“  
“Do you have your lockpick?” Jack tried to cut off any speculation on Phryne’s part. He was already listening for the telltale sound of flames outside the room, and hoped she wouldn’t reach the same conclusion.  
“Of course. You’ll have to let go my hand.”  
Unseen in the dark, Jack grinned. He knew very well where she kept her lockpick and was half-surprised she hadn’t drug his hand along with hers.  
Jack heard her move closer to the door. She scrabbled for many minutes to open the lock, but the utter darkness made it difficult—the door was an odd one, and she couldn’t be sure she had found the correct opening for the lockpick. After trying every conceivable option, she moaned, “I just can’t seem to get it!”  
Jack was sanguine. “We’ve been working at this long enough for me to think that at least they don’t mean us any further harm. Apparently they just wanted to stop us.”  
Phryne sighed. “What can we do now?”  
Jack thought it over for a moment. “Ridiculous as it sounds, I suggest we try to go to sleep.”  
“SLEEP?”  
“It’s late. We can’t see anything. We can’t investigate, and we can’t get out. No one will be looking for us. Or—will they?”  
“No, of course not. I didn’t think this would be anything more than a little search. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going.”  
Phryne heard him moving beside her, then she heard the sound of things being pushed around. “What are you up to?” Phryne asked.  
“I thought I could see if there are any open cartons in here. We could pull some of the packing straw out, and put it on the floor…Aha!” Phryne found her way to Jack by following his voice—that unmistakable voice, she thought. Between the two of them, they pulled quite a bit of straw onto the floor. Jack pushed it up against the wall.  
“Hmm. Well, it will make things a little more comfortable,” Jack said.  
Phryne heard some other movement. “Jack, what are you doing now?”  
“Taking off my coat.”  
“What? But it’s so cold in here! Oh…” She felt the topcoat, still warm from his body, draped around her shoulders.  
“You’ll need it more than I will,” Jack said plainly.  
Phryne felt it would be sporting of her to argue the point, but she was already chilled to the bone. In addition, she quite liked the feel of Jack’s coat around her, hanging to her ankles.  
“Thank you,” she said simply. “Oh, but it will be ruined if I sit on the floor in it!”  
“Rubbish. I’ll have it cleaned. It’s just a coat, Miss Fisher.”  
It seemed like more than a coat to her. It was almost a symbol of the man himself.  
“Can I—er—hand you down to the floor—er—I’m not really certain how to invite a lady to sit on a warehouse floor…”  
Phryne laughed. “I haven’t seen that in the etiquette books! I’ll manage, thank you.” In the dark, she didn’t have to hide her grimace at the thought of what she might be sitting on, or in. She sensed Jack finding his way to the floor beside her. “Now what?” Phryne asked.  
“Now, we try to sleep. Unless you’ve a mind to tell ghost stories?”  
“No campfire.”  
“You can thank your lucky stars for that.”  
“I wish I could see some lucky stars. I can’t believe this warehouse is so well sealed.”  
To her surprise, she felt an arm pulling her against a very solid shoulder. “Go to sleep, Phryne,” Jack said very quietly.  
It amazed her so much that she thought she might never fall asleep, as she considered this new development. But it was late, it was utterly dark, and the steady beat of Jack’s heart under her ear was so reassuring…Jack listened as her breathing slowed, and then evened out, so he let himself give in to sleep as well. 

Phryne woke when a sliver of light shone in her eyes. She was instantly aware of the cold of the warehouse, as well as the warmth of the body she had wrapped herself around. She raised her head from his shoulder to look up at the familiar face, now darkened by a day’s growth of beard. His face was softened with those piercing eyes closed, and long eyelashes gentled his aspect even further. She smiled a little wistfully. Sometime during the night, Jack had turned his collar up against the cold. Phryne moved slowly, cautiously, to try to unwrap the edge of the overcoat from around herself. If she moved carefully, perhaps she could stretch it across his chest, to warm him. She tried to avoid waking him, but he roused almost immediately.  
He opened his eyes slowly, looking unfocused for a moment. “Phryne,” he said simply. His morning voice was even more gravelly than usual.  
She smiled fondly up from his shoulder. “Good morning, Jack,” she whispered, with none of her usual sass.  
She was just beginning to register the change in his breathing when he leaned in to kiss her. He consoled himself that there wasn’t a man alive who could wake up to Phryne Fisher, after holding her in his arms all night, and not kiss her. 

She twined her arms around his neck and pulled him even closer. Once loosed, passion escalated rapidly between them. Long-denied ardor overcame Jack, and he rolled her underneath him onto the floor. Almost as soon as he did so, sanity prevailed and he pulled away. “Phryne. I don’t know what I think I’m doing…”  
“I would have said you know exactly what you’re doing!”  
“On a warehouse floor…that’s cold…and filthy.”  
Phryne smiled ruefully. “Hmm. The ambience does leave something to be desired.”  
Jack sat up, pulling her off the floor as he did.  
Phryne said pertly, “I’m glad to know that first kiss wasn’t a fluke.”  
“What?!”  
“At Café Replique. Your kisses are delightful. Promise you won’t make me wait so long for the next one,” she directed.  
He had no answer for that. He blinked at her, then changed the subject. “Let me help you up.” He stood and offered his hand.  
Phryne stood up, gave her head a good shake, and pushed her hair into place with her fingers. She shrugged her shoulders under Jack’s topcoat, and her clothes fell into place. Jack looked on in amazement. “How on earth do you do that? We just spent the night in a warehouse, and you look like a fashion plate.”  
She smiled, catlike, and leaned in close. “And you, dear Jack, look deliciously rumpled.” He frowned.  
“Clothes looking slept-in,” she ran her hand down his lapel, “a full day’s beard,” she stroked his rough cheek, “and that curl that keeps escaping..”  
He self-consciously raked his fingers through his hair.  
“Oh, now you’ve spoiled it,” she said.

Even with only a sliver of light to help, Phryne could find the correct opening in the door to pick the lock with ease. It still took a powerful shove from Jack to open it against a wedge that had been added to prevent their escape. The two walked out into the warehouse, still empty.  
“Well. It appears that was a colossal waste of time,” Jack complained.  
“We never really got a chance to go through that room before we were locked in,” Phryne suggested.   
“I’ll send some men over later this morning. I think I’ve had enough of this place.”  
Phryne took his arm. “It wasn’t without its charms,” she said with a sly look at Jack.  
Dryly, he said, “You can’t say I don’t know how to show a girl a good time.”  
“I would never say that, Inspector.”  
He smiled and pulled a piece of straw from her hair.


End file.
